why can't @foo be treated as an implicit list for DWIM purposes?

What DWIM purposes? You want a scalar as first argument to foo, so Perl is doing exactly that, evaluating the first argument of foo in scalar context.

This is a known issue with prototypes, and one of the reasons prototypes in Perl are often thought of a "a failed experiment". If you prototype foo as taking one scalar as argument, and you want foo @foo to succeed, what's the point of using a scalar prototype? Any argument is going to be scalar anyway. The only "use" could be to fail if @foo != 1. But that means you cannot do prototype checking at compile time, but have to defer it to runtime. But the neat thing about prototypes is compile time checking.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Function Prototype Context Conversion by Abigail-II
in thread Function Prototype Context Conversion by tadman

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